Film
What's on at the cinema plus reviews of the latest movie and DVD releases
Manhattan (1979)
Director: Woody Allen
Movie review
From Time Out London
The ICA has a seasonal gush in its press release, tagging Woody Allen’s gem of comic kvetching as perfect ‘for anyone who’s been in love’. But love doesn’t fare too well in Allen’s black-and-white paean to both his city and its inhabitants, who exist in that very particular, hyper-neurotic patch between the media and academia that the director has mined so adroitly in movies from ‘Annie Hall’ to ‘Husbands and Wives’. Here, Allen himself is Isaac, a television writer thinking of making the leap to proper literature, whose 17-year-old girlfriend Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) appears positively adult in his shadow. Meanwhile, Isaac’s friend, Yale (Michael Murphy) is doing the dirty on his wife with feminist iconoclast Mary (Diane Keaton), a woman who waxes about the ‘Academy of the Overrated’ (Van Gogh, Bergman, Mahler, Mailer…) and makes such effortless declarations as, ‘My problem is that I’m both attracted and repelled by the male organ’. When Yale decides to end things with Mary, Isaac steps into the vacuum, leaving plenty of room for him to worry about his dying relationship with Tracy and the impending publication of a memoir by his ex-wife-turned-lesbian, Jill (Meryl Streep).As ever, Allen has Bergman on the brain (his character even calls him ‘the only living genius in cinema’), but here he crafts a successful marriage between his own brand of self-aware comedy, a Bergman-esque concern for the pain of relationships, the elegiac music of Gershwin and Gordon Willis’ monumental photography of the city. Amid the blinkered and selfish behaviour of Isaac and his cronies, it’s Tracy who wins the moral crown but everyone else who gets the good lines.
Author: Dave Calhoun
Time Out London Issue 1894: December 6-13 2006
Cast & crew
Director: Woody Allen
Producer: Charles H Joffe
Cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, Mariel Hemingway, Meryl Streep, Anne Byrne, Karen Ludwig, Wallace Shawn full cast
Genre(s): Comedy
Rated: 15
Duration: 96 mins
UK Release: Mar 14 1979
Most popular on this site
Top Stories
Has David Cronenberg turned tame?
Has director David Cronenberg veered too far from his radical and bloody roots with new film 'A Dangerous Method'?
The 10 worst date movies
Just in time for Valentine's Day, we present ten of the least romantic films ever made
Where to watch this year's Oscar-nominated films
Find out where to watch 2012's Oscar-nominated films in London cinemas
10 unlikely badboy biopics
Featuring Phil Collins, Jeremy Clarkson, Nick Clegg, David Starkey and a host of other unlikely subjects
Interview: Sean Durkin on 'Martha Marcy May Marlene'
The first-time director of the brilliant new thriller discusses religious cults and robot boxing
Pop-up cinema for Valentine's Day
Side-step romantic clichés with some alternative Valentine’s viewing







What do you think?
Post your review now